Despite the similarity to Standard Chinese, it is characterized by some "iconic" differences, including the addition of a final rhotic 儿; -r to some words (e.g. 哪儿; nǎr).
"[5] Until at least the late 18th century, the standard language of the Chinese elite had been the Nanjing dialect, despite political power having already been located in Beijing.
[5] Through the nineteenth century, evidence from Western dictionaries suggests that a shift occurred in the court from a Nanjing-based standard to a more local Beijing-based one.
This was overturned in 1926, resulting in the "pronunciation of the educated natives of Beijing" officially adopted as the basis for the phonology of Standard Chinese (Guoyu) in 1926.
"[2]Some argue that Cantonese is the "only dialect which has attained a level of prestige that rivals that of the standard national language.
Those north of the Forbidden City spoke with a more "refined" accent than the poorer people, craftsmen, and performers of the south.
[citation needed] However, the Beijing dialect also has vernacular readings of characters which are not only different, but have initial and final combinations that are not present in Standard Chinese, such as 嗲; diǎ, 塞; sēi, 甭; béng, 忒; tēi,[15] and 色; shǎi.
This phenomenon is known as 儿化; érhuà, or rhotacization, as is considered one of the iconic characteristics of Beijing Mandarin.
[2] When /w/ occurs in syllable-initial position, many speakers use [ʋ] before vowels other than [o] as in 我 wǒ, and [u] as in 五; wǔ, e.g. 尾巴 wěiba [ʋei̯˨pa˦].
⟨j q x⟩ /tɕ tɕʰ ɕ/ are pronounced as /ts tsʰ s/ by some female speakers, a feature known as 女国音; nǚguóyīn; 'female Standard Chinese'.
For example, in fast speech, initial consonants go through lenition if they are in an unstressed syllable: pinyin] ⟨zh ch sh⟩ /tʂ tʂʰ ʂ/ before ⟨e i u⟩ become ⟨r⟩ /ɻ/, so 不知道; bùzhīdào; 'don't know' can sound like bùrdào; 老师; lǎoshī can sound like lǎor, resulting in a "swallowing of consonants",[2] or 吞音; tūnyīn.
[citation needed] Affricates are elided into fricatives when not word initial, such as 茅厕; máocè becoming máosi.
[26] The aspirated bilabial stop /pʰ/ and the labial approximant /w/ are phonemes only found in loanwords from Chinese and Tibetan, evident in their limited distribution in Mongolian.
(with phonetic reductions)今儿 得 下雨， （所以） 出门儿 时候 记着 带 伞！Jīnr děi xiàyǔ, (suǒyǐ) chūménr shíhòu jìzhe dài sǎn!Jīar děi xiàyǔ, (suǒyǐ) chūmér ríhòu jìr dài sǎn!